I finished a final estimate of the losses we incurred due to the insane cold snap this weekend. It came out to exactly 20%.
3.4 acres of Rebecca’s vineyard were hit and hit hard by the sub 30’s temps this past Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Below you can see the temp data from our RanchSystems weather station. The sensor from which the data was collected is located right in the heart of a low lying swale.
Not good times. Worse than average for the county, but better than some. El Jefe at Twisted Oak is estimating that they lost 70% of their crop this year.
To estimate the losses I mapped out the affected areas on Google Earth and did some grade school geometry (turn all the complex shapes into simple ones, find the area…) and math, but it’s pretty accurate.
Maybe some of the shoots will live on and I’m overestimating. I don’t know. We can pray at least.
Hi Josh, terribly sorry to hear about this.
Marco
Thanks Marco. Everything will sort itself out in the end, but really I appreciate your words.
wow, that sucks. sorry.
out of curiosity, why don’t you get some fans/mister thingies? too expensive?
Wow, really too bad. And with your permit issue last year…
Just think how great the book version of your story will be after overcoming this adversity! “Neither bureaucrats nor acts of God could keep the pinotblogger down…”
Dude!! My sympathies as well.
A great nation rises from the rubble of mother nature. Talk with you soon.
Ouch. There is nothing uglier than a young shoot burned by frost. And this time of year is the worst– it is after the frost date, and pruning later would still have done nothing. Just a nice f-you from la mere nature. I will be up early next week to survey the damage.
That image is just ugly– like a bad year in champagne. It makes me cry inside.
Sorry to hear…I talked to Twisted Jeff last night briefly about all the frost as well. That’s rough.
We’ll keep our fingers crossed…
Hi Josh,
My name is Shannon and I’m the editorial assistant at Foodbuzz.com. Following up on a recent email invitation to be a part of our newly launched Foodbuzz Featured Publisher program, I just want to reiterate that the Foodbuzz team loves reading your posts and would be very excited to have you become a part of our blogging community. I would love to send you more details about the program, so if you are interested, please email me at Shannon@foodbuzz.com.
Cheers!
Shannon Eliot
Editorial Assistant, Foodbuzz.com
shannon@foodbuzz.com
Josh,
Sorry to hear about this loss and also sorry I missed you at WineTwo.
Kind Regards,
Benjamin Arnold
Wow, I am so, so sorry. I can’t even imagine the heartbreak. I hope you have overestimated and time will tell. Don’t feel defeated, push on my friend.
Gee wiz Shannon, the guy just lost 20% of his crop, maybe save it for another post huh….
Dang, sorry to hear this. Don’t get down man, this kind of thing has a way of working itself out–there is a silver lining somewhere!!
Welcome to the risky bits of cool climate Pinot Noir growing places. Now, as it is still very early in the season, you will have enough time left for the new shoots to ripen their own fruit. We just started to have budbirst over in Germany here on that date. The big problem will be canopy management. A great big mess and extra work… And pruning next winter is the next challenge. We had sufferd a lot of frost damage in Nov 2007 in NZ. We had to spur prune many vines. Depending on the variety, we didn’t get a good fruit set and ended up with hardly any grapes.
Well at least we got our frost problem solved with a new wind machine.
Methotrexate….
Imuran methotrexate. Hcg levels up after shot of methotrexate. Methotrexate safety….